Ranking Well In the Baidu Search Engine

Getting good rankings in the Baidu search engine is not an easy task if you are accustomed to working with Western search engines such as Google US. The Chinese search engine spiders sites much the same as other spiders. It follows links from one site to another and also follows links that are submitted to it manually. However, there are a few differences in the way the websites are ranked. For instance, Baidu places more emphasis on the number of incoming links and meta descriptions, while Google is concerned with quality of incoming links.

Information on Baidu

Baidu is the leading search engine for websites, audio files, and images in China. The company offers a Chinese language search platform, which consists of websites and certain online application software, as well as Baidu Union, which is the company's network of third-party websites and software applications. The company primarily provides Chinese language Internet search services to enable users to find relevant information online, including web pages, news, images and multimedia files, through links provided on its websites. You can read more about the full services available on the the Baidu search engine on China Analyst.com.

Baidu introduced "phonetic" or "pin-yin" search, which allows users to type in Chinese keywords using English alphabets. This feature is designed to skip the switching from English input to Chinese input, and for when the user is not sure of the written form of a keyword. Since there are many different ways to pronounce and state common words, and many different dialects, this was a huge addition for the search engine which greatly set it apart from all other search engines. Read more about Pin-Yin.

Baiduspider, the proprietary spider for the Baidu search engine, is load capacity friendly and is designed so it will not overload your site by visiting it too quickly. Unlike some other search spiders of the West, Baiduspider also obeys the Internet robot agreement. You can forbid baiduspider from indexing all or part of your site, by correctly setting up your robots.txt file to block portions or your entire site. Read more about how to optimize your Robots.txt file on our blog.

In addition to natural search results, Baidu also displays paid search results within the body of its search results. Baidu mixed its paid advertisements with its natural search results until recently when the search engine began to separate the results. Soon, all paid results will be segregated from natural listings (very similar to Google) making it easier to find organic rankings quickly, and more important to implement your SEO correctly.

Key Takeaways

What should be implemented in order to rank well in the Baidu search engine?

Get back to the basics of SEO. Pay attention to title tags, meta tags, descriptions and keywords. Correct usage of H1 and H2 tags, alt tags, and anchor text.

The anchor text for internal linking matters, so be sure to optimize it.

Write the site in Chinese, not English. This includes alt tags, description, title tags, keywords, content, etc.

Increase the number of incoming links. Keep in mind that Google looks at the quality of links. In order to maintain strong rankings in Google and acquire good rankings in Baidu, one must balance the two. Acquire good quality links in high quantity numbers.

Having servers located in China helps the equation, since this gives credibility to the idea that the site is Chinese, and should be ranked well as a Chinese site.

Tamra has been involved with Internet marketing for nine years and even wrote her Master's thesis about the advantages of SEO as a form of marketing.
She has a lot of experience in working with analytics and metrics in addition to SEO.
Tamra loves animals (she has 4 goats, 9 chickens, 7 geese, 1 dog, and 1 cat), flower gardening, and camping with her boys.